Burying clues using context and interpretation

This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series Clues in non mysteries

This technique is similar to using framing for burying clues, but distinct enough I think it warrants its own entry in the series.

In this method, the clue really is in plain sight. No tricks to cover it up or conceal its importance—only its meaning. Using the viewpoint character’s perspective, we explain away the clue because we’re seeing it out of context. Perhaps the POV character isn’t hunting for clues right now, or maybe we’ve moved from the plot with the mystery into a subplot involving other characters—anything to move the POV character’s frame of mind somewhere else so that the clue doesn’t seem to bear any extra significance.

To cite an example I gave in the comments of an Edittorrent discussion on burying clues (although this is a mystery, the concept applies across genres; emphasis added):

Let’s say that your plot is structured so that the hero is a detective and there’s been a murder at our heroine’s office (her supervisor was killed [with a staple gun, which our heroine doesn’t know], and there’s an obvious suspect). In her free time, our heroine has been helping her best friend start her own cafe.

Our heroine is helping to decorate the cafe (in her subplot). Her BFF asks her to hang the grapevine lattice on the ceiling, since she’s afraid of heights. The heroine takes the lattice and the staple gun up the ladder and obliges.

But really, the BFF is avoiding the staple gun because she killed the coworker (insert motive here). But because we’re out of context, given a plausible alternate explanation, and not in an investigative POV (and note the BFF doesn’t mention the weapon of choice), it’s easy to dismiss it (as long as there’s a clear purpose in the scene, too).

Plus, now the BFF can frame our heroine with her prints on the murder weapon.

Jami Gold also gave a great example of a slightly different methodology for doing this in the comments. The POV character interprets the clues into a context that might make sense to them, but it’s not correct. The heroine thinks the hero’s giving her A Look because he doesn’t approve of the friends she’s going out with (or doesn’t care about her); the hero can’t believe she’s ditching him.

What do you think? How do you use context and interpretation to bury clues?

Photo by Scott Vandehey

Burying clues using sequencing

This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Clues in non mysteries

This is probably the most basic way to bury a clue. It doesn’t require any smoke and mirrors to distract the readers while you talk as fast as you can to misdirect their attention. No, to use sentence sequencing, you just keep talking. Same tone, same pitch, just making sure that you don’t end on something important—namely, a clue.

Generally, we want to put the most important or highest impact element in a sentence or paragraph at the end. There, it carries a little extra resonance, and gives the reader a mental “blip” to commit that element to memory.

The second best place for the high impact element in a sentence is the beginning. Here, you still have very good reader recall, but because the sentence or paragraph continues rambling downhill after that, you undercut the impact of that element.

The serial position effect suggests that humans best recall elements at the beginning and end of lists. The first item (primacy effect) actually shows a slightly higher recall rate than the last item (recency effect).

To me, both these effects have some useful applications. We can use the beginning of scenes and paragraphs (and perhaps even sentences) for elements that we want our readers to remember throughout the passage: scene goals, for example. We can use the ends of scenes, paragraphs and sentences for words and thoughts with the most impact.

Which leaves the middle: the best place for things we want our readers to notice but not place too much significance upon. Theresa Stevens at edittorrent has called this the “Mystery Clue Effect.” It’s nothing more than sticking the important item in the middle of a list, sentence, paragraph or even scene, and moving on to something else with a natural flow.

What do you think? How do you hide clues with sequencing?

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Burying clues using repetition

This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series Clues in non mysteries

It sounds counter intuitive, doesn’t it? And I suppose it’s a little bit of a misnomer. Really, in this case, we’re less burying the clue and more building it.

You can use this to indicate in a very tight POV (third or first) to help show that your character is deceiving himself or herself. In this case, the character “doth protest too much,” insisting so much that things are a certain way or s/he feels a certain way that it begins to ring hollow. This can be a difficult balance, because less intuitive readers may not be able to read between the lines of the repetition.

The repetition method can also be particularly useful with revealing a villain’s identity (which, admittedly, is more of a mystery genre feature, but isn’t exclusive to the genre). I’ve used this in the past by repeating scenes with the villain, similar encounters where the villain slowly escalates until we finally see what he’s capable of.

In this variation, we repeat an element—whether that’s the villain or a symbol or a trigger to flashbacks—and each time, we add another layer to the clue. In this method, naturally, we want to hold back the most important and most revealing layers until later, when the readers and the characters (we hope) solve the story’s mystery in time for the final confrontation, whether that’s internal or external.

What do you think? How would you use repetition to build or bury a clue?

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Kill the participles!

More about burying clues in (non)mysteries next week!

Okay, so participial phrases at the beginning of sentences have become one of my pet peeves. I don’t mind them when they’re well done, but unless you’re pretty handy with a clause, you might want to avoid them. This might seem like just one of those silly arbitrary rules that are just made up to help us prove we’ve read up on the latest so-called rules for writing, which will change in another ten years.

But present participial phrases are not just a magical hoop editors want us to jump through to prove that we’re familiar with industry bywords. It’s mainly an issue of grammar (and to a lesser extent, style, but that’s because they’re overused). Complaining about strictures against present participial phrases is almost like complaining about commas. There are correct places and times for using commas, and incorrect ones, and I suspect that most of the time, if we carefully look at a book, we’ll see that most of the commas are used right and perhaps not as often as we thought.

I really came to understand this by reading the posts on present participial phrases at EditTorrent, a blog by two editors. But if you don’t feel like clicking through, I’m happy to summarize the anti-present participial phrase arguments.

First, to clarify, these are not gerunds. Gerunds are typically not a problem. Gerunds are the -ing form (present participle) of the verb used as a noun:

I enjoy writing.
Writing is fun.

For the most part, this isn’t going to be a problem in a sentence, since they’re on the rare side. (I.e. beginning each sentence with a gerund would also be a problem, especially in the midst of too many present participial phrases, but the occasional correct usage of a gerund isn’t going to hurt anybody.)

What we’re talking about here are present participial phrases:

Running to the door, I called out my son’s name.
Writing out the prescription, the doctor didn’t bother looking up.

I think you can probably see how this is already becoming a problem.

Now that we’ve got that straight, on to the primary argument: Present participial phrases are, to put it mildly, evil.

The vast majority of the time in amateur usage, these phrases appear too often, are often misused, create other grammatical problems, don’t reflect how real people think—and I’m just getting started.

A: Present participial phrases are overused, especially by amateur writers.

Not to say that any of us here are amateurs, but too many present participial phrases are a mark of an amateur. Frankly, more than one per page (YES, per page) jumps out at me. Three on a page don’t just jump; they scream. People who aren’t really aware of this grammatical construct can inadvertently begin almost every other sentence with a present participial phrase. Seriously. I’ve critiqued *good* writers who still almost made my eyes bleed. This happens exceedingly rarely in the published books I read.

Important note: this standard seems to be very different for UK & Canadian publishers. Whatevs. TMMV.

B: Present participial phrases are frequently misused.

The grammatical construct of a present participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence ALWAYS means that the action in that phrase and the action in the main part of the sentence are simultaneous. Always. (There’s sometimes a bit more leeway when the present participial phrase appears after the main part of the sentence, though technically speaking there shouldn’t be.)

So, these would be not only grammatically incorrect, but physically impossible:

Chomping down on her food, she stuck her tongue out. (Ouch.)
Sneezing, he sang an aria.

However, there are lots of things you can do simultaneously:

Smiling, she walked down the aisle.

An important note here is that reading is a very linear activity—we read one word and then the next—and these phrases can make it easy to misunderstand or just slow us down as we try to figure out the order of the actions and picture them. This is so important it could warrant its own letter, but I don’t think I really need to explain this more.

C: Present participial phrases frequently cause misplaced modifiers.

The action or state described in a present participial phrase must ALWAYS describe/be done by the subject of the sentence. If not, you get a misplaced/dangling modifier:

Running to the car, the cat darted between his ankles.

The only grammatically correct way to understand this sentence is that the CAT was running to the car. At best, this sentence is ambiguous—we really can’t assume that it means the man was running. If I want to say the man was running to the car and the cat darted between his ankles, I’d be much safer to say THAT.

Walking down the street, a bat bit the man on the thumb.

Grammatically speaking, this sentence says a bat was walking down the street and bit a man on the thumb. Paraphrased from a famously bad police report.

D: If we’re supposed to be writing in our character’s thoughts and minds, present participial phrases would appear sparingly at best.

People rarely think that way. Really, think about how you think. Okay, generally we think in pictures, but when you do use words, is that how your thoughts go? If we’re seeking to replicate our characters’ voices and internal thoughts, then, would they use them?

Varying sentence structure isn’t a good enough reason for these either. As editor/author Alicia Rasley points out, varying sentences isn’t an end to itself: it’s an intermediate goal to create a smooth read.

Since these constructions do stick out if used incorrectly or awkwardly or too frequently, and so many first drafts contain so many present participial phrases that you can’t construe their usage as actually varying the default sentence structure anyway. Again, important enough to get its own letter, but I don’t want to beat you over the head with this.

To conclude:

Okay, maybe present participial phrases aren’t exactly evil, but just like commas, but we have to be VERY careful about how we use them (or we’ll end up with something ungrammatical or bizarre) and very judicious about when we use them.

In my opinion (formed by the careful tutelage of the editors I mentioned above), the best use of a participial phrase is for something that describes the state of the subject of the sentence, NOT an action:

Hoping she wasn’t too late, she dashed into the room.

Her emotional state in this sentence is one of hoping.

Yes, sometimes published and unpublished authors use present participial phrases. I invite you to find a book published in your target market or by your target publisher, flip to any page and count the number of sentences that begin with present participial phrases. I was amazed when I did this: books that were decades old or only a few months both yielded very few.

What do you think? How often do you really use present participial phrases? What did you find when you opened a book in your target market?

Photo by Bird Eye

Burying clues with melodramatic misdirection

This entry is part 4 of 11 in the series Clues in non mysteries

Another framing to disguise (or distract readers from) clues is using melodrama. The editors’ blog Edittorrent defines melodrama succinctly: “If the emotion is bigger than the situation warrants, it’s melodramatic.” Melodrama, by definition, is characterized by “exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts.”

Generally, we think of melodrama as something bad, but it’s not as evil as it sounds. Sometimes melodrama is useful in a story. Author and former editor Deborah Halverson wrote a post on the Query Tracker blog about one of the good uses of melodrama: young adult fiction.

But that’s not the only good use for melodrama. In the same post on Edittorent, editor Theresa Stevens gives us a great example of how this oft-maligned tool can also help us bury clues:

For example, in mysteries, we often try to hide clues in plain sight by mentioning them in small ways, and then surrounding them with bigger things. “Hey, look, there’s a bullet hole in this wall. AND OMG SOMETHING JUST EXPLODED AND BLEW ME OUT OF MY BOOTS.” The explosion might make good plot (in context), but the bullet hole is the detail we’re trying to sneak into plain sight.

Naturally, as we’re doing this, we have to be careful. For an experienced reader, the placement of a clue right before a melodramatic distracting event might be too coincidental—an experienced reader knows to look in plain sight 😉 . Even experienced readers, however, can be distracted by continued (melo)drama: keeping the pace going after the explosion in the above example, instead of a lull so the reader’s thoughts might return to the bullet hole. And hey, it wouldn’t hurt to destroy the wall that had the bullet hole in it, right?

What do you think? How do you use melodrama to misdirect your readers? Can you be distracted by melodrama?

Photo by Loren Javier

Bury clues using framing with scene goals

This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Clues in non mysteries

Finally, the fun stuff: techniques for making sure your clues and foreshadowing are in there, but don’t attract too much attention from your reader that you’re telegraphing the pass.

Burying clues is all about framing: mentioning the object or information in plain sight, but in light of something more important so that the reader doesn’t think, “Ah, this is out of place/overly conspicuous/waaay too innocent looking—it must mean something.”

The first way we’ll discuss burying clues I’m calling “using framing with scene goals.” Scene goals are the POV character’s “mission” going into the scene. These goals should be fairly obvious, and may even be stated: “He had to get that folder from her before she looked inside,” “If I didn’t find out what the assignment was, I was toast,” etc.

So the POV character comes into the scene focused on this goal—maybe a little too focused, in fact. Maybe so focused that we use this to our advantage. As Jack Bickham explains (emphasis mine):

We know that the viewpoint character is strongly motivated toward a specific, short-term goal essential to his long-term quest when he enters the scene. Therefore, he will tend to be preoccupied with this goal throughout the scene. In fiction, as in real life, people tend to interpret everything in the frame of reference of their preoccupation of the moment. This is why it’s sometimes possible to make the wildest excursions inside the conflict appear to have relevance: The viewpoint character will inevitably interpret almost anything as relating back to the goal; you can show his line of thinking in an internalization, and so drag the seeming excursion far afield back into apparent relevance.

When our characters are so focused on this goal, we can use that focus to help the character (and thus the reader) dismiss something that might obviously be a clue. “Oh, he’s just hanging around because he needs to get the assignment, too.”

The scene goal tempers how a character sees material clues. They can explain them away easily: “Oh, that paperwork is on her desk—good! She’s been busy. She hasn’t had a chance to look inside the folder.”

Or they can just barely notice them—just enough to warrant a mention, but we have a MISSION here, people, and we are not going to get sidetracked!

What do you think? Have you ever had a character so focused on a scene goal that they led a reader away from a clue?

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The rank OBJECTIFICATION of writers

I came across this last year, and many of you have probably have seen this, but found this article funny: the advantages of dating a writer, or the rank OBJECTIFICATION of writers.

My favorite parts:

* Writers will offer you an interesting perspective on things. Yes. Constantly. While you’re trying to watch TV or take a shower. You will have to listen to observations all day long, in addition to being asked to read the observations we wrote about when you were at work and unavailable for bothering. It will be almost as annoying as dating a stand-up comedian, except if you don’t find these observations scintillating we will think you’re dumb, instead of uptight.

* Writers are smart. The moment you realize this is not true, your relationship with a writer will develop a significant problem.

What are your favorite parts?

Should fiction be moral?

In case you missed it (and you probably didn’t), recently there was a bit of a debate in the blogosphere over a certain article which decried the darkness prevalent in YA fiction. I can’t remember if I actually read the article, but I did read the responses of many who took issue with the premise, claiming that YA fiction reflects the dark reality teenagers today know.

I’m not going to argue with that point—but I am going to say that I don’t think that a bleak, hopeless vision of reality is a good way to help someone cope with a future that feels tenuous and perilous at best. Even if a book ends in tragedy, it can still reaffirm readers’ hope.

A YA dystopian I read recently is set in a world without love. It’s illegal to even use the word. Already that sounds pretty bad, eh? Naturally, the MC falls in love, and *SPOILER ALERT* the novel ends tragically. And yet we’re left with hope for the MC to have a better life because of the sacrifice made for her.

I think I tend to side with author John Gardner, at least as his On Moral Fiction is summarized by Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

[F]iction should be moral. Gardner meant "moral" not in the sense of narrow religious or cultural "morality," but rather that fiction should aspire to discover those human values that are universally sustaining. [I assume this means things like hope, character, etc.] Gardner felt that few contemporary authors were "moral" in this sense, but instead indulged in "winking, mugging despair" (to quote his assessment of Thomas Pynchon) or trendy nihilism in which Gardner felt they did not honestly believe.

What do you think? Should fiction be “moral”—by this definition or another?

Photo by Tahmid Munaz